us at the time to bid our leave to the Depot in Columbus & ship West this being our plan from the beginning. The 18th were in need of men & we were ready to roar Good Riddance! to that depot & its barking sergeants & parade drill & its pig fit vittles & calisthenics. I do not need tell you that in all them weeks of training to be soldiers we never fired 1 single musketball & nor did any other recruit. As you can see it would not be long til we would learn how remiss were our masters in leaving this ignorant scumtide of men with no means to fight or to die fighting at the very least. After all the Army is paying them as soldiers so that you might get to thinking the Army would instruct them in how to load & shoot like soldiers. But you know well Sir that would be too sensible by far for the Army. No word of a lie that Depot was more in the way of a workhouse than a place where a man might learn the first thing about proper soldiering.
Tom & myself knew already more than any man needed about parade drill & we were lucky enough to know even more us about musketry so out of there we did get & onto a troop train bound for Ft. Leavenworth in Kansas.
The less said of the journey the better for the air inside the train cars was as cold as a coffin & every inch of that train was stuffed full of men in every posture of ill repose with each car choked with tobacco smoke & steam & engine ash that coated the innards of a man’s nose like a whore powdering herself from the inside out no matter how tight we tried to shut them windows.
Tom & myself & a gentle Ohio boy some years younger in age to us did stay drunk for the duration on homestilled whiskey we bought at whistle stops & arrived in Kansas in no fit state to fight off so much as a head cold never mind your red savages but sure by then they were mostly peacified round Ft. Leavenworth anyway. But little did that matter for every other man on the train was drunk as well & there was a fine lot of fighting on the journey between some Dutch boys over bad cards & the way certain words be pronounced in their language. I am sad to write that one well juiced soldier God Keep Him did fall to his death trying to piss from between cars & more than one man ended that journey in the Leavenworth Guardhouse. The Provost squad on that train had its work cut out & well for them the b______.
But never mind because as is the way of things in the Army well when we did arrive what did we do but set up waiting there. It was cool the boots I tell you for most of that bitter flat Kansas winter.
Now I may as well say here (for it be of some importance to my story) that on that journey we met for a 2nd time the Sutler Mr. Kinney whose fate we now know but could never imagine then.
You see we never once returned to his Stores at the Depot though we did purchase the odd bobbin here & there by giving our money to other Bills for to get it so as to avoid his evil eye & ill will after rumbling his & Sgt. Nevin’s ruse. And though we never saw him on the train we came across him at a whistle stop somewhere West of Indiana outside the hired car (1 in front of the caboose) which he shared with his wife & all his goods & wares & which was guarded by 4 sentries with sidearms & Springfields.
We would bide time by strolling up & down the platform at whistle stops looking for a fellow with a bottle & some boiled eggs to sell as there did be more than 1 such lad at each junction. This was the 3 of us myself & Tom & the Ohio boy who had a fine way about him which endeared him to many. He was a kind & harmless thing who in the end did get a bottle stuck in his neck in a hog ranch outside Ft. Riley so I later heard tell &